Not long ago you asked Kurt Skauen about his AtheOS, a GPL'd OS with an integrated GUI and notable commonalities and differences from certain other GPL'd OSes. Kurt responded at length on everything from choice of programming languages to whether you'll see a version of AtheOS soon for the PPC. He also talks about dealing with interoperability (with Windows and with *NIX), why he chose the GPL, and what might drive him to change the AtheOS licensing.

Anonymous Coward sent in: "I just ran across a very cool homemade emulation console. It emulates multiple machines, plays movies, plays mp3s, and uses Intel's new wireless gamepads to control everything. It's also cased in plexiglass and uses its own menuing software. The best I've seen yet!" His remote has a docking station.

TimeTrav writes "Check out this review of a PalmOS emulator for the PocketPC platform. At this point, it only runs V1 and V2 roms, but work is underway for V3 and V4 rom compatibility. If this works, I may just have to fork over the cash for an iPaq. This has pretty profound implications; its like carrying two handhelds in one, if it works." This helps answer an old Ask Slashdot question as well. Now, will it be able to run Linux on PalmOS on WinCE?

Mike Bouma writes: "Check out this posting by Amiga`s CTO on the AmigaOne Mailing list. It includes some concept pictures of a GUI for the Amiga Digital Environment, which is being targetted at AmigaDE enabled handheld devices like Sharp`s upcoming Zaurus PDA. Some of the younger Slashdot readers may not be familiar with the classic AmigaOS, however interested people can (re)discover the AmigaOS through emulation, I suggest to check out this easy to setup "Amiga in a box" package."

Stealth Dave writes: "Remember all the hullabalu back when someone first put Linux on the Dreamcast? At the time you could only get a text console and no source was available. Well, I saw over at DC Emulation that the folks over at m17n.org have screenshots of the Dreamcast running X Windows, X-Mame and PrBoom (a Linux Doom port)! They even have an ftp site with a Dreamcast distribution. What will you do with your $99 Linuxcast?" So now the Dreamcast can run GNU/Linux and BSD, and may get Inferno and Plan 9. Phew -- all for $119 at K-mart.

Emmanuel Dreyfus writes: "Linux Compatibility on BSD for the PPC platform is a three-part series of articles published at O'Reilly's ONLamp.com. The series is intended to document various parts of the emulation subsystem, and to highlight some architecture-dependent issues that can arise in argument passing, signal handling, and with the way some system calls work. The first article is now available, with the others to follow soon." Though the article cautions that it is intended for the technically astute, it includes a very lucid description of what emulation requires, and how it actually works.

evilviper writes: "BSDToday has a great article on how to run Linux binaries under OpenBSD. The article's already been picked up by sites like RootPromt and others so it's obviously as good of a tutorial as it gets. It's short and sweet, while covering everything from installing the OpenBSD linux package, as well as getting and installing the Linux libs for those of those without a Linux box to steal files from."

Doug Muth writes: "Earlier today, I came across an old document on Lars Wirzenius's website titled Linux Anecdotes, which tells about the side of Linux that we never knew. An excerpt: 'At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day. '"

Doug Miller (no relation) is an amazingly affable and unflappable man. This interview came about because I asked Doug face-to-face if he'd do it when we met after a panel discussion he was part of in Washington DC a few weeks ago. He said "sure" without even a second's hesitation, let alone checking with PR people. His answers to the 10 selected questions we sent him are 100% straight-up. You may not like everything he says (devout Free Software people probably won't like any of it), but Doug Miller deserves your respect (and courtesy) for telling it like it is -- at least from Microsoft's point of view -- without a hint of weaseling.

Ur@eus writes: "We have just put up an interview at Linuxpower.org with Dominic Lachowicz of Abiword. I think it is an interesting read where Dom talks about what features are currently implemented, and what are underway. Abiword belongs to a very small elite of Free Software GUI applications which runs on almost all major desktop platforms without any emulation."

wokness writes with this bit of depressing news. "The arcade business is getting thougher and tougher -- from shoryuken.com: 'The Nikkei Telecom 21, the largest online news & information database in Japan, has reported that Capcom will discontinue sales and development of arcade games.' More info here. This sucks!" Seems like Capcom wasn't making enough money to justify themselves selling large boxes to arcades. Now, they'll go all the way (instead of just using emulation to make cross-platform games) and make games for home consoles instead.

Halkun writes "Sony and Connectix settle out of court. The story is at www.psxemu.com's home page" We've had a whole slew of stories about this. Once the terms are released, this whole have a big effect on the whole emulation scene, I predict.

Gridle writes: "In short, eFront was a company which bought out successful websites and turned them into cash cows by maximizing profit through different ways of banner and other advertising. Not a bad idea, except that their methods aren't exactly pretty ones. A disgruntled employee obtained some crucial ICQ logs (mirror), which show the true spirit behind eFront. It includes cheating on banner companies, cheating on top100 sites, talking about raping a female webmaster because she doesn't agree on some points, tax evasion, delaying payment to webmasters, literally harrassing sites out of existance and all kinds of other nasty stuff. Somebody put together a summary about how it concerns the emulation scene. Also notice OverClocked's comic about it and Tim Eckel's previous ventures against the emulation community, and Penny Arcade. And it's all over the place already. FuckedCompany, SomethingAwful, Lum the Mad (and their forums), Get High Forums, mame.dk support pages and Retrogames' General and Current Affairs boards. Somebody even found that their CEO has earlier been convicted."

Chanc_Gorkon asks: "I am in need of a 3270 emulation program for telnetting to a 3270 host. So far the only thing I have found that works well is x3270, but I need a terminal mode emulator that doesn't need X11. Mostly I need this so we can have a S/390 Linux box be able to talk to another VM guest running DOS/VSE, but if it doesn't compile on S/390 it's no big deal either. I tried tn3270, but it's incredibly old and once compiled it segfaults when I press a key after trying to connect to the host. I have also tried 32704.1 and it just plain doesn't work. Anyone know of other options that I haven't tried??"

jmaslak expresses himself thusly: "I'm in the market for yet another new mouse. My average mouse-span is three months. Once in a while, I can stretch it to four, but sometimes the darn things die after only one month. I've tried cheap mice and expensive mice. Microsoft makes a decent mouse, as it usually lasts four. But I hate spending $50 every 4 months!" (Read more for the details of jmaslak's quest.)

wedonneednoSTEEKINGguis asks: "After an hour of Google searching that turned up empty, I turn to the next best thing, Slashdot's hordes of trained monkeys. Does anyone know whatever happened to the console-mode (character-based, text-mode, whatever you want to call it) Word Perfect for Linux 5.1? I'm -positive- I recall it being included with the full GUI package in some Linux version or another, but naturally all traces of it have disappeared from Corel's FTP site, and I can't even find any references except for people talking about using emulation to run MS-DOS binaries. Word Perfect continues to be the WP of choice in our office (as well as many legal firms, so I've heard), and we don't need the features or want the overhead of a graphical version. Does anyone know where this beast might currently be located, or has it become unofficial abandonware?" Ah, I remember quite a few teenage summers where I worked in jobs that used the text version of WordPerfect. Of course, I never could remember keyboard command for "bold"...Alt-F5, or was it F6?

Kyudosha asks: "With the recent emergence of some of these high-quality SNES emulators for Dreamcast, I find myself wondering about those emulators that aimed to do the same thing for the PSX. I seem to remember a few... what happened to them? The PSX has good hardware, it should be able to handle SNES emulation, shouldn't it? Plus, with the advent of some of these compilers for the PSX, wouldn't it be easier to port, say, SNES9x to to the PSX?"

Acheon writes: "The CPS-2 arcade board from Capcom uses some hard encryption scheme that has been a very hot issue in emulation for years. Yet finally the code was broken Final Burn, a quite recent arcade emulator, showed concrete results by running previously unsupported games such as Street Fighter Zero using decrypted ROM images. The CPS-2 Shock Team, who managed to reverse engineer the process for scratch, really outdone themselves and it is a very uncommon achievement." Thanks to Jamie for also pointing out more info.

Kevin Lawton, currently employed by MandrakeSoft, is the creator and driving force behind Plex86, the Open Source X86 virtualization software which runs under Linux and now boots several operating systems, including QNX and Windows 98. This is a tricky endeavor, because (among other things), as the plex86 site states: "The x86 processor is not 'naturally' virtualizable. That is to say, it was not designed to run multiple operating systems concurrently." But with enough feints and jabs, Kevin and company have cajoled it into doing so anyhow. He's agreed to answer your questions about virtualization (and / or emulation -- he is the guy behind the also-Open Source bochs project to emulate X86 processors), so please post your stumpers below. Make sure to check out the Plex86 website first, and perhaps read other things about Plex86 on Slashdot. (And "What's the point?" is not a stumper.)We'll forward the top questions on to Kevin, and hear back from him soon.

The list grows of how many OSes Plex86 can boot. Soon you may have an easier time of installing a new kernel (besides turning to page 207 of Running Linux). SAGE wants to know the intimate, personal, steamy details of how much you earn as a SysAdmin. Also, not everyone trusts the proposed data-escrow deal involving Celera and Science. All below, in this episode of Slashback.